David L O’ Nan’s dreamscapes in Before the Bridges Fell begin and end with a wild incantatory mythic tone: the book opens w/a hitchhiker, an internal monologist-Cassandra, a prophet journeying thru small town America. We enter w/them into a shotgun ride through Hell. With a visionary sensibility that never lets up, whether it’s broken nostalgia, the neon memories of punk or mid-west beats & NYC dreamers, this book is a responsive mix, its pop-inflected ballads, flash-surreal gorgeously stimulating epics pummeling the frontal cortex and the rear-view mirror of the reader’s brain.
O’Nan perfects a highly personal image-repertoire, including the balladic, to entertain dark, indie-infused jagged tales of ecstatic & failed love. Poet & short story writer, publisher, photographer, O’Nan’s work emits a howling phosphorescent, Dylanesque rock-n-roll bardic presence, taking us a step or three further along saturated highways with poetic raconteurs soaked in their pharma-dystopic imaginations.
Vast, jagged, oracular, these are stories-as-song, of a nightmarish-Americana, cold, yet somehow hopeful, the propulsive experiments asking, how is it that a vengeance of truths can capture what it means today to live beyond salvation’s increasing twisted reach.
– Robert Frede Kenter, author of EDEN (Floodlight Editions), publisher & EIC Ice Floe Press, http://www.icefloepress.net.
Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.
Bending Rivers: The Poetry & Stories of David L O’Nan out now!
Fevers of the Mind 